View: Donâ€™t panic, robots are not job snatchers

Remember the panic about jobs getting shipped off shore? Well, that is child’s play compared to the emerging tumult of fear being generated by jobs being completely eliminated by robotics.

Net­net, people are frozen stiff with fear, and it’s the responsibility of respected analysts, consultants, academics and journalists alike to educate and world using real, substantiated facts.

Sadly, the likes of Gartner, McKinsey, Oxford University and our beloved Stephen Hawking, all seem hell­ bent on capitalising on the panic to grab the headlines, as opposed to dispelling much of the scaremongering such as:

McKinsey believes 45% of current jobs could be replaced using technology that already exists Forrester claims 1 mln US B2B sales jobs will go away by 2020. Gartner predicts 1 in 3 jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025.

According to an Oxford University study , 47% of total US employment is at risk Stephen Hawking warns us AI would be the biggest and possibly the last event in human history The beauty of all these wild predictions is that few will remember who made them in a couple of years or the fact they were made at all. That’s the beauty of being an analyst in today’s market you can make up any old fantastical claptrap and never be held accountable for it in the future. At HfS, we believe here is likely to be modest downsizing of 9% over the next five years as low­-end tasks are increasingly automated across major service delivery locations. And this 9% will be immersed in natural attrition and redeployment of workers to other industries, as global services streamlines and matures as an industry. So why are so many automation and AI claims factually incorrect and irresponsible?